Editorial Standards

Every legal claim made here is checked against a primary source before it is published: the text of the opinion itself, not a headnote or a case-brief service's summary of it, and the text of the statute, not a treatise's paraphrase of what the statute is understood to require. Where a piece describes what a court held, that description is checked against the reasoning in the opinion itself, not against how a later citing court characterized that reasoning. A citing court's own summary of an older decision is a secondary source in its own right, and it carries a drift risk of exactly the kind this practice exists to catch.

Sourcing follows a fixed order. A published judicial opinion, a codified statute, or a state constitution comes first, and a link to that primary text accompanies the claim it supports. Secondary material, a law review discussion or a practitioner treatise, may inform how a piece frames a subject, but no statement here about what a case or statute holds rests on a secondary source alone. Aggregator sites and case-brief services are not treated as sources; they exist to save a reader time, not to be relied on for accuracy, and a claim sourced only to one of them is not printed.

Corrections are recorded rather than silently amended. When an error in a published piece is identified, whether flagged by a reader or turned up during later research on a related subject, the piece is corrected and the fact of the correction is kept rather than the original language being quietly swapped out as though the error had never appeared. Anyone who believes a piece here has misstated a holding, a citation, or a fact is asked to identify it specifically: the sentence in question, the case or statute it concerns, and what the primary source actually says.

Outside contributions are read against the same standard applied to everything else this publication runs. A submitted piece is judged on whether it identifies a genuine area of doctrinal disagreement, whether its claims about what a case or statute holds have been checked against the primary text rather than assumed from a summary, and whether it is written at the level of specificity the rest of this site is held to. Whatever this publication writes for itself is never paid for, and inclusion is never guaranteed by submission alone. A piece that does not meet this standard is declined; it is not printed with the gap left in.

None of this is unusual, and none of it is complicated. It describes how a subject moves from a proposal to a published page here: sourced to the primary material first, checked against what that material actually says, and corrected openly on the occasions that checking turns up an error after the fact rather than before it.